Reddit Reddit reviews Freedom Evolves

We found 13 Reddit comments about Freedom Evolves. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.

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Freedom Evolves
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13 Reddit comments about Freedom Evolves:

u/calladus · 5 pointsr/atheism

>which accepted as true by a wide number of scientists

No, it isn't..

Check out Quantum indeterminacy

Quantum physics shows that all physical systems (including our universe, or you and me) necessarily have randomness as part of their basic makeup.

Also see the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.


Now, having said that, it is possible to postulate a universe that looks as if it is random, even to our physics and math, but where every single state in our universe is actually predetermined. But in such a universe, we will be completely convinced that we live in an uncertain universe, and will act accordingly. Indeed, the sheer complexity of such a universe may make it seem as if it were random even to an observer who knew better - like watching a complex game of Conway's "Life". (See "Freedom Evolves" by Daniel Dennett)

But this is philosophy, and from what I read in the science journals physicists believe that the universe we live in does support indeterminacy.

u/disquieter · 4 pointsr/explainlikeimfive

A cellular automaton (CA) is an object that exists and continues to exist in a cellular space.

One kind of cellular space is an arrangement of cells in columns and rows, like a grid.

Each cell will either be ON or OFF in any single moment of time. In this basic cellular world there are rules that decide whether a cell will be ON or OFF in the next moment of time, given just two factors:

  • whether the cell is ON or OFF in the current moment; and
  • how many of its neighbors are currently ON. The second rule is adjustable. This is just a mathematical exploration, after all. :)

    If the cell is ON and not too crowded or too starved for neighbors, it will remain ON in the next moment of time. Otherwise, it will be OFF in the next moment.

    Most arbitrary arrangements of cells will disappear after just a few moments. But certain arrangements are special. They manage to persist over time. They do cool things like move across the grid, reproduce, or spawn others.

    CAs are these special arrangements of cells that manage to persist through time and/or do interesting things.

    CAs are interesting to mathematicians as systems/structures that can be studied based on starting with careful definitions of cellular worlds.

    CAs are interesting to intellectuals generally because CAs seem to resemble unicellular life forms. CAs and their worlds seem like a good metaphor for how life, a surprisingly complex and interesting phenomenon, can arise from what seem to be relatively simple rules of physics and chemistry.

    In short, CAs are cool, complex things happen in world with just a few simple rules. Kind of like life.

    If you want to read about some of the ways in which a particular CA world called the "Game of Life" (defined by mathematician John Conway) is really thought-provoking, you can read Daniel Dennett's awesome book, Freedom Evolves.

    Edit: I accidentally some words.
u/mjrice · 3 pointsr/askscience

In the realm of philosophy (not empirical science) Daniel Dennett does a (imo) nice job of making the case for free will in a deterministic universe in his book Freedom Evolves. Check it out if you are interested in this sort of thing.

u/[deleted] · 2 pointsr/woahdude

Daniel Dennett wrote a book called Freedom Evolves and a huge part of it is based on the concept of this game.

u/Parmeniscus · 2 pointsr/PhilosophyofScience

Daniel Dennett's entire book on free will is a discussion of what free will is, why it can exist in a materialistic and natural world, and the implications of defining free-will out of existence - which has been done on one side by theologians who claim free-will must be supernatural, and on the other by naive neuroscientists who claim free will is an illusion.

u/lanemik · 1 pointr/DebateReligion

Compatiblist philosophers like Dan Dennett disagree with you. The topic looks like it might interest you, so check out Freedom Evolves and Elbow Room.

u/shizzy0 · 1 pointr/gaming

Strange article. I liked how he put the game into a serious context, but there are some statements that aren't well founded.

> Science in the shadow of Darwin therefore became concerned not with prescribing rigid order to the universe, but rather with observing the intrinsically random behavior of natural systems. There is a principle of spontaneity at work in the universe, and Darwin touched his fingers to its pulse.

We model genetic mutation as a random event, but that doesn't mean it happens spontaneously without any physical cause. We can't distinguish between a truly random event and a huge causal network whose components we lack observable access to.

> Determinism, in the long run, is untenable, and anything we cannot believe, in the long run, cannot possibly be true.

"Anything we cannot believe cannot possibly be true." Who says? This author obviously, but there's no principle that demonstrates we have a perfect receptacle to understand and believe what's true. Death probably won't serve as an entrance to a cushy afterlife. Lots of people refuse to believe that, but that doesn't mean it's not true.

Overall, I liked the article and the game sounds intriguing. I can see why the author wants to preserve notions like free will, but I don't see determinism being anti-thetical to free will. Daniel Dennett has a neat examination of this topic in his book Freedom Evolves where he demonstrates a world both with and without determinism that still has what he defines as free will.

u/Eh_Priori · 1 pointr/TrueAtheism

Denett also wrote a book or two on the topic.

u/larkasaur · 1 pointr/skeptic

Dennett's book Freedom Evolves is a well thought out explanation of how free will coexists with determinism.

u/Crazy__Eddie · 1 pointr/DebateAnAtheist

I could go on and on about how uninformed your post is, but it would take time and it would most likely be completely pointless and unappreciated. So I'll just give you this as a starting point to inform yourself. Obviously not the only way of looking at things but certainly an interesting one.

u/big_bad_bunny · 1 pointr/atheism

recommended reading: Freedom evolves by Daniel C. Dennett.

I found it a tough but very interesting, enlightening and liberating read. The book seems to downloadable as a free pdf too, but at first glance I couldn't find any sites that I trust enough to download from.

EDIT: Wikipedia article

u/thedward · 1 pointr/programming

Thank you for your detailed reply.

You present a compelling list of things that we
don't fully understand about the human mind, but I'd
hesitate to lump all these things together in the
"concsiousness" bin. Otherwise, we risk "consciousness"
just meaning "the things about the mind we haven't
figured out yet".

> although they're superficially awake, they later have
> no memory of stretch of road they navigated.

Do we remember those things we were conscious of, or do
we say we were conscious of them because we remember
them?

> And it doesn't help to try to explain it away by
> saying "it's just that their attention was diverted
> and they were multitasking", because all of those
> issues of attention and multitasking are part of what
> we need explained by a theory of consciousness.

This is certainly a phenomenon worthy of explanation,
but seems more likely to be a result of our
limitations. If we have a only a certain amount of
processing power available, we can't put everything at
top priority at once.


> I mean, think about it: a hypothetical AI might be
> able to pass the verbal Turing test and pass various
> visual and problem solving equivalent tests that have
> been proposed, but not be able to multitask, and not
> be able to divert its attention away from the world
> around it.

Or, it might be able to pass several verbal turing
tests at once, while creating a new branch of physics
and writing a play about existentialism. It might have
any arbitrary number of loci of conciousness limited
only by available processing power and memory. Only
having one locus of consciousness seems to be more of a
bug than a feature.

> Therefore, the usual "thought is all about logic"
> notion of AI, isn't even trying to explain certain
> things that just about everyone has noticed
> informally about the human mind.

I don't think anyone working in AI these days
subscribes to that particular notion. There is still
AI work going on using logic programming and such, but
I don't think anyone believes that is the pathway to
human level abstract thought.

> Another area is about the conscious mind versus the
> subconscious mind. There is controversy over whether
> the latter exists, but if it does, how are the two
> different?

I think anyone who would argue against the existance
of the subconcious mind is either being disingenuous
or playing terminology games. I'd argue that the
difference between what is conscious and subconcious
is largely a matter of processing priority and what
actually gets recorded into memory.


> Yet aside from trivial things (like startle
> reflexes), comparatively little is known about the
> subject. How are things allowed by the pre-conscious
> to become conscious, and why?

If we imagine each thought having a volume, then we
could say that the one with the loudest volume is the
one we actually hear, or are conscious of. That thought
can choose to raise the volume of a different one,
or you can have an emotional response that raises or
lowers the volume of various thoughts.

Our analytical thought is driven by our emotions. Our
emotions give us cues (sometimes commands) about what
is important.

> And how does all of this fit in with our intuitive
> feelings that we have free will?

The free will discussion is a whole other bag of
worms. I would highly recommend checking out [Freedom
Evolves](http://www.amazon.com/Freedom-Evolves-Daniel-C
-Dennett/dp/0142003840/) by Daniel Dennett. Even if you
don't agree with his conclusions, I think you would
find it interesting.

> Those things, and more, should be explained by a
> theory of consciousness.

I think it more likely than not that they will
eventually be explained by several different theories.

We may end up with a bunch of different theories that
explain almost all of these things, but I bet whatever
is leftover will still get labeled "consciousness". :)


> I believe that it may be possible to have some kind
> of strong AI without a theory of consciousness, and
> without the AI "being conscious", but I would think
> it's obvious that it could not be a human-like strong
> AI.

I strongly supsect that any AI we create will not be
very human like at all. Though it is possible we may
end up with uploaded people running on simulations of
the physical brain.

> I further believe that it could not duplicate the
> full range of human cognitive skills, absent such a
> thing. (We already know that it can do somethings as
> well or better, like play chess, but what about the
> entire range?)

An inhuman AI might be less competent than humans at
things specifically human (things that depend on our
particular emotional complement) or an AI that was
significantly smarter (whatever that means) than us
might be able to model human emotions well enough to
fake them when appropriate.

> This overlaps with, but is not identical, to the
> important role that emotion plays in human cognition
> (if emotion is not otherwise accounted for in a
> strong AI theory, then put it in the consciousness
> theory).

Emotion plays a key part in human consciousness, but it
may be that it is just one possible way of directing
consciousness. Even if we create AI with something like
emotion, it is unlikely that their emotions would map
directly onto ours.

This is fun.

Thanks again.

u/PragMATHimatiCOOL · 1 pointr/CrazyIdeas

No worries, I appreciate your continued interest and not dismissing this set of thought-patterns outright since there’s many compelling off-ramps / reasons they are not as common as you’d expect real/correct ones to be! :) Maybe the real “crazy idea” to me here is that it’s kind of wild how vastly common the non-reality-matching vague understanding is, when there is one that is more compelling / coherent / reality-observation-matching. I understand why we as humans have mostly begun thinking there, though, and it’s pretty interesting from a historical/evolutionary/meme-evolution angle.

Viewing the “mechanistic view” as opposed to “free will” is a false dichotomy—it’s crazy common though! In reality, the bundle of patterns we regard as “free will” is an emergent pattern FROM mechanistic patterns evolving. (In case you’re suuuper interested in a thorough slaying of the false dichotomy, the concisely-named Freedom Evolves by neuroscience-friendly philosopher-scientist Dennett is a mountain of science-backed evidence on the topic—but my caveat is he’s more annoyingly dense than anything you’ve just read from me! b/c this is hard shit we’re not very well set up / evolved to naturally comprehend—watching some YouTube videos of his might be more enjoyable)

I think the reason many folks view a vague concept of free will as vaguely opposed to a mechanistic view is often just (1) a failure of imagination — I can tell you I believe with extremely high confidence that there’s nothing non-physical about our brain’s operation in the mechanistic universe, and that doesn’t strike me as odd, wrong or irreconcilable. It just strikes me as—we were not historically great at thinking about how the very high level pattern of feeling of free will emerges from the low level pattern of the brain—given we didn’t even understand how the brain recognized objects based on our vision until less than 10 years ago—and it didn’t matter for our continued existence as patterns in the universe so why would we have evolved to care :D

Reason #2 is that many cling to a notion that the MIND must be somehow distinct from the BRAIN (i.e., “magical person sitting in your brain controlling it with levers” — we’ve peered into the brain and understand it quite well — that’s just not how the brain’s constituent patterns are structured). Why cling to such a notion? Why did we assume it’s distinct? Because it fits many of our preconceived world views — it helps us hold on to human special-ness, our religious precepts, hell—many words (fossils of past ideas) we are using to discuss with one another right now have these prejudices / assumptions baked in to them (notice the “I”s, “you”s, etc. — these are artificial distinctions we’ve just found evolutionarily / continued-pattern-existence useful).

We’re just in the last 5 or so years developing software thinking patterns (AI, narrowly focused than AGI) that have surpassed human-based thinking patterns in more and more fields. I can tell you with high confidence there is no ceiling that separates our bodies and brains and that which can be accomplished through software (even set within the Game of Life — just with a really large game board—the universe is vast like a super giant game of life game board). Those closest to development consider AGI something that will happen this century (myself included).

I believe there’s value in this reality-matching view becoming more common. It’s kind of like taking a dump and seeing things clearly when it clicks—damn—reality is all that is real. He’s a pattern, she’s a pattern, we’re all patterns, and that’s all cool!!